People are already raging that Reddit can't pay moderators, but that Spez takes more compensation than Tim Cook while his company reports losses. Reddit said it themselves, one similar website could take them out and that's exactly what I see happening once the landscape changes from community to profit which to your point is already happening given recent events.
I’m guessing disaggregation will hollow them out by taking away many of the high-engagement subreddits, and only then will one website be able to come in to start the reintegration cycle.
I’m guessing something similar to Discord, but discoverable via search, will be the Reddit killer.
De-centralized, self-moderated, payment options available, the company optimizes the tool rather than the content, etc.
A system like that removes most of the headaches that the current Reddit ecosystem causes.
People moderate on Reddit because they enjoy doing so. The mods may complain about not getting paid, but they'll continue moderating anyways. If they don't, then other people will actively volunteer to take their place.
It's not true that mods don't get paid, exactly. They don't get paid by Reddit, but being a Reddit mod gives you plenty of opportunity to get paid. You're allowed to run ads all over the sub. I know people making over $100K/yr from moderating a sub.
You couldn't pay me to mod a big sub (again, I did it for a couple years). The mod queue of a large sub is soul-crushing (at least where large is >10M, idk about smaller ones). Humans can be real *******s. And the admins don't appear to care about it at all.
